Saturday, November 22, 2008

The Strange Case Of Hassan Diab, From "An Age Of Murder."

The evidence against Ottawa's Hassan Diab, now facing murder charges arising from the 1980 bombing of a Paris synagogue, looks a bit sketchy thus far. But whether Diab is guilty or innocent of the charges he faces, there might be something useful about the trial, to the extent that it casts some long overdue light on a period Jeffrey Herf describes as an "age of murder . . . a product of the intersection of antisemitism with left-wing radicalism."

Many may dispute the proposition that this age has truly passed - athough perhaps not that it has passed in its German phase - but here (and the whole thing here in .pdf), Herf bookends the period thus: Between the placement of a bomb by the "West Berlin Tupamaros" in that city's Jewish Community Center in 1969, and the 1992 attempt by the Rote Armee Fraktion to blow up a Budapest bus filled with Russian Jewish émigrés.

It's also illuminating to read Herf's essay alongside Mathias Kuntzel's arguments for situating the roots of contemporary Islamist Jew-hatred within the tradition of European fascist anti-semitism. For just one recent eruption of that classic, drooling pathology abroad in Arab society, here's a television interview with Syrian economist Sharif Mazloum, who traces the current global financial crisis back to the scheming of the Zionist lobby during Richard Nixon's presidency, the control of the world's gold supply by the Jews, and even further back, to the Zionist assassination of John F. Kennedy (peace be upon him).

The General, who pointed me to Herf's essay, also advises it be read alongside this.